OT : Disaster recovery?

[Martin Hepworth]

Colocation Colocation wrote:
> So I've just spent the past 3 weeks setting up and tweaking my 
> Mailscanner installation. I've done every possible tweak and gone 
> through everything with a magnifying glass and it all looks great.
> 
> So now my thoughts turn to backups. How best should i protect my 
> investment? I cannot yet justify a second box for redundancy so if all 
> goes wrong i will need to be able to quickly get my mail server back online.
> 
> I'm considering taking one of my raid mirrors out and rebuilding the 
> array online. That way i will have a spare incase it all goes wrong.... 
> however there are alot of drawbacks to this.
> 
> My server is equipped with lights out management so really what i want 
> to do is a "bare metal" type backup, that way if anything does go wrong 
> and i happen to be holiday i will still be able to fix it.
> 
> Dream Scenario : uh oh for x reason my server has totally died and all 
> data is lost. I ssh in, boot off my already connected USB key and 
> reinstall the operating system. (or some kind of restore software?) I 
> then pull my backup from my ISP's san storage and begin the restore. Two 
> hours later my server is back online and serving mail as it should be!
> 
> Any thoughts? Or am i living in cuckoo land?
> 
> 
> 

well 1st thing I'd do is DOCUMENT what you've done!

-- 
Martin Hepworth
Senior Systems Administrator
Solid State Logic
Tel: +44 (0)1865 842300

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